Admins struggle to provision consistent VS Code setups
IT administrators, infrastructure teams, and educators want users on shared machines or VMs to start with the same VS Code settings and extensions. The requests describe per-user installation and workarounds such as copying extension folders or running login and startup scripts, which are difficult to maintain as a polished, repeatable setup. Most of this evidence is from 2017–2018, so the current state of VS Code’s management features needs to be checked before building.
For IT administrators provisioning shared developer environments. Mentioned from Oct 2017 to Jan 2026 on GitHub and Hacker News.
18 different people described this problem in 11 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 5.0/10
- Pain
- 6.2/10
- Frequency
- 10.0/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 5.0/10
- Who pays
- Businesses
- Competition
- Medium
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
A few weeks ago I intended to migrate from sublimetext to vsc, but this issue was a show stopper. For me (developer and administrator) it is unusable without default settings / the ability to be "installed" (for all users) by copying one single folder
You have to install extensions, then move them form your user profile into common area and then use the option you provide. As @Bitmapped mentions when setting up a standard build of a VM or client machine we need to be able to install extensions into a common place for ALL user to access, not install multiple copies o…
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 1 product idea with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 4 places to find your first customers
- 19 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks